Harvard Understands

When Harvard University decides to offer its courses online, you know a “new day” has dawned in higher education!

With a $30,000,000,000 (yes, that’s $30 billion dollar) endowment, Harvard could easily afford to stay aloof in its Ivory Tower of educational institutions. But, Harvard has decided it makes both financial and cultural sense to join 3rd tier colleges that have been offering its courses online for years.

Until now, those 3rd tier colleges have given online education a reputation that has not exactly been sterling (although the world’s largest online university, Liberty University, has done much to enhance that image in recent years).

Harvard’s entry into online education has changed everything. No longer can any college resist offering its courses online or dismiss online education as substandard.

Congressman Ron Paul recently wrote, “Online education can be sold profitably for a tenth the cost of an Ivy League university. From now on, what the colleges sell is a myth: overpriced, brick-and-mortar education that is no better than online education.”

Paul goes on to say, “Don’t be hypnotized by bricks and mortar. They are not worth the money at the undergraduate level, except possibly in a few natural sciences. Not in the liberal arts. There is no good reason to attend traditional schools in the first two (overpriced) years.”

A college makes most of its income from its lower division courses (the first two years) which courses are often no more than repeats of the last two years of high school. For the student who actually knows why he is going to college, these “required courses” are often a huge waste of a student’s time. Instead, let your student take CLEP exams and, if done right, he can enter college as a Junior the day he graduates from high school and begin taking classes that actually matter!

All this information is included in my new book, available now at Amazon.com in both paperback and Kindle.